So, not long ago in the grand scheme I found out one of my friends has breast cancer.  There is another skinhead mohawk pending once I get a moment.  More recently my grandmother died.  It's sad but she was just shy of 100 so it wasn't unexpected.  Tomorrow I'm on a plane to Melbourne, and will be home on Saturday.  This is mostly heads up that there may or may not be a progblog next weekend depending on how I'm feeling.

Progress-wise, well.  With the scales I was really going out of my way to avoid drawing them.  I figured once I got the hang of the scale brush everything would be sweet.  Well I decided eventually that I would just see what drawing them would look like.

Almost fell into old habits of not posting because I'm currently stuck in November as far as progress on stuff I was supposed to be working on (before getting massively sidetracked by the Rewrite the Stars songpic).

Now I had actually gotten a fair way further than this and was doing pretty all right when I realised two things. 

Yeh yeh I'm late again.  Much shenanigans happened on the weekend taking 11yo, a bunch of her giggly friends and 13yo to Bounce (9yo was meant to come to but he'd sliced his toe open on Thursday by deciding it was imperative that his iPad be unlocked on the way to the car rather than in the car after he'd clipped in and thus he didn't notice the kerb I'd parked next to), and then one of the girls stayed over (which I found out was happening on the day, fortunately I'm cruisy).

Also I didn't visibly progress as much as I wanted.  As far as the work is concerned well I'd love to tell you how any times my perfectionist tendency has kicked my sorry tail to the kerb repeatedly (aka I kept redoing the thing because I wasn't happy with something or other and because of how the scales intersect it was really hard just to remove the section that was causing the problem) but I've long since lost count.

I progressed!

`

tl;dr: bake the damn things.

After painting, from the paint room go to Textures > Texture Baking Tool

Fill in the stuff on the dialogue box as appropriate (I have no idea how correct my settings are, I tend to take a best guess with anything I don't know :P)

Testing out 3dCoat's sculpting tools as well.  Roughed out shape with voxels then switched to live clay for detailing.  Painted and autopo'd and automapped (I swear that thing is going to make me so slack - the manual retopo tools are also pretty awesome) and exported but haven't fired it up in Blender yet.

Testing out 3d Coat (which I ended up buying after all of one day).  I'm going to have to improve my texturing skills now that I have a kickass texture painter.

Starting work on my entry for The Great Pokemon Sky Race Collaboration.  I need to do another version of 3d-fyn (because the last one blew up while I was fiddling with something, probably the rig, and then I reworked Base's rig anyway) as well.  3d-fyn will be riding Flashwing (pidgeot from my Pokemon Yellow game) in mega-evolution (I think mega evolutions are kinda dumb really, however mega-pidgeot form is theoretically big enough to carry 3d-fyn otherwise we'd need an enormous pidgeot).

Build list

When I did the head hair I did a scalp (copy of the...uh...scalp on the top of the head where the hair is growing out of shrunk down to fit just inside the head) with its own material to colour the hair strands because it was the easiest thing to do as the hair strands pick up whatever texture is applied to the geometry.  Wasn't too crazy about the extra geometry but couldn't work out how everyone else on the planet had done it so crashed around the particle system and node tree til I got something going.

Add the hair in the usual fashion:

I have no idea what I'm doing (despite reading the internet).

I had to redo the hair emitters about a million times because I kept blowing something up (and not knowing what I blew up, but combing strands in Particle Mode is kind of amusing for a while).  When I finally got that sorted my first test looked like a polyp colony.

When I eventually got something I liked I couldn't work out how to get the red (which is actually supposed to be bleached but I just grabbed a random high constrasting colour at the time) to just be on the mohawk (probably needed a uv map) and then the fuzz on the side was playing silly buggers.